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Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism Paperback – February 21, 2010
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Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?
Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.
Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come.
In a new preface, Wolin describes how the Obama administration, despite promises of change, has left the underlying dynamics of managed democracy intact.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication dateFebruary 21, 2010
- Dimensions6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
- ISBN-10069114589X
- ISBN-13978-0691145891
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"[A] comprehensive diagnosis of our failings as a democratic polity by one of our most seasoned and respected political philosophers. . . . Democracy Incorporated is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States--including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors."---Chalmers Johnson, Truthdig
"[Democracy Incorporated provides] a rare, chilling analysis of intellectual critics of democracy. If democracy means more than occasional elections and protection of those rights that are compatible with economic and political elites' interests, Wolin's analysis of our democratic predicament is shocking, solid, and fundamentally correct."---C. P. Waligorski, Choice
"Sheldon Wolin has produced an ambitious and broad-ranging book that examines the current state of democracy in America. . . . Wolin argues that the unquestioned faith in the virtues of free market capitalism has dramatically narrowed the range of policy options that are on the table when debate turns to resolving the US's ills. . . .[T]his is a trenchant and powerful volume."---Alex Waddan, International Affairs
"Of the many books I've read or skimmed in the past seven years that attempted to get inside the social and political debacles of the present, none has had the chilling clarity and historical discernment of Sheldon S. Wolin's Democracy Incorporated. Building on his fifty years as a political theorist and proponent of radical democracy, Wolin here extends his concern with the extinguishing of the political and its replacement by fraudulent simulations of democratic process."---Jonathan Crary, Artforum
"[W]e need to understand the deep roots of our present troubles ourselves and Wolin's book is an excellent beginning."---Toby Grace, Out in Jersey
"Democracy Incorporated acts as an antidote to unconstrained corporate power and an elitist obsession and should be widely read by all those who cherish democracy and civil liberty."---Shih-Yu Chou, Political Studies Review
"[Wolin] provides a rich narrative of the struggle of elites and the demos from ancient Greece through the writing of the U.S. Constitution and into the present, and the corporate-managed politics that has emerged will survive no matter which party holds Congress or the presidency."---Coleman Fannin, Journal of Church and State
"Despite being written shortly before both the financial crisis and the Obama victory, the main lineaments of his analysis are still alarmingly cogent."---Tom Angier, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
"To find our way back to normalcy in a time of crisis and emergency we must ask ourselves, 'how did we get here?' Wolin's wisdom is a helpful guide for that journey." ― Salon
Review
"As we've come to expect from Sheldon Wolin, a tightly argued and deeply revealing book about the dangers of unconstrained capitalism for our democracy."―Robert B. Reich, University of California, Berkeley
"For half a century, Sheldon Wolin has been one of the most distinguished and influential political theorists in the United States and a perceptive observer of the American political scene. In his magisterial latest book, Wolin shows himself at the height of his powers as he presents a highly original, sober, and persuasive account of a number of tendencies in contemporary American society that constitute a significant danger for the future of constitutional democracy. If totalitarianism establishes itself in the United States, it will be in the 'inverted' form Wolin analyzes in this important book."―Raymond Geuss, University of Cambridge
"Wolin's writing has a resonance that binds the canon of political philosophy to unfolding events and present circumstances. In Democracy Incorporated, he contends that the institutions and practices that Americans regarded as their defense against totalitarianism―and other forms of authoritarian domination―have failed them. There is nothing like this book. It is a major, potentially revolutionary contribution to political thought."―Anne Norton, author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire
"Powerful and persuasive. Democracy Incorporated does exactly what great political theory should do: it provides a theoretical framework that allows the reader to see the political world anew. It left this reader with an almost nightmarish vision of American politics today, a nightmare all the more terrifying for being so compelling, so vivid, and so real."―Marc Stears, author of Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State
From the Back Cover
"With his fundamental grasp of political theory and restless spirit to get at the essence of what threatens modern democracy, Wolin demonstrates that the threats to our democratic traditions and institutions are not always from outside, but may come from within. It is a book that policymakers and scholars of contemporary society should read and reflect upon."--Rakesh Khurana, Harvard Business School, author of From Higher Aims to Hired Hands
"As we've come to expect from Sheldon Wolin, a tightly argued and deeply revealing book about the dangers of unconstrained capitalism for our democracy."--Robert B. Reich, University of California, Berkeley
"For half a century, Sheldon Wolin has been one of the most distinguished and influential political theorists in the United States and a perceptive observer of the American political scene. In his magisterial latest book, Wolin shows himself at the height of his powers as he presents a highly original, sober, and persuasive account of a number of tendencies in contemporary American society that constitute a significant danger for the future of constitutional democracy. If totalitarianism establishes itself in the United States, it will be in the 'inverted' form Wolin analyzes in this important book."--Raymond Geuss, University of Cambridge
"Wolin's writing has a resonance that binds the canon of political philosophy to unfolding events and present circumstances. In Democracy Incorporated, he contends that the institutions and practices that Americans regarded as their defense against totalitarianism--and other forms of authoritarian domination--have failed them. There is nothing like this book. It is a major, potentially revolutionary contribution to political thought."--Anne Norton, author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire
"Powerful and persuasive. Democracy Incorporated does exactly what great political theory should do: it provides a theoretical framework that allows the reader to see the political world anew. It left this reader with an almost nightmarish vision of American politics today, a nightmare all the more terrifying for being so compelling, so vivid, and so real."--Marc Stears, author of Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Princeton University Press; Revised edition (February 21, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 069114589X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0691145891
- Item Weight : 1.12 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #978,694 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #681 in Fascism (Books)
- #993 in Political Freedom (Books)
- #1,667 in Democracy (Books)
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Meet the New Boss. Otherwise known as MGMT, not so much a drug as a hierarchical dictator with no sense beyond the exceptionally-limited equation of exclusivity that occurs between buyer and seller, MGMT stands in the middle, between the American people and the people's government. Especially saddening to me as I read this book is that Wolin refuses to mince words, pull punches or otherwise detail anything without philosophic exactiude pop politicos like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter, among many, including the rodeo clown, Glenn Beck, now an exclusive resident of Grapevine, Texas, a sort of Kow Loon village of looney cattle who, like Beckster, are literally infatuated with the making of mony, is that these types of books are drowned-out by utter noise as the udder of the Big Black Kow Loon is labeled onto every street sign and traffic light as if to tell us which signs to beleve and which to consider outright lies or merely aversions.
Kowloon is a Chinese City that stands right across the narrow land border between Hong Kong, home of King Kong, and mainland China. Like the current and somewhat tawdry state-of-affairs now coming online in the former vaudeville act once known as the United States of America, Kowloon is a sort of half-and-have dose of the kind of milk adults might drink.
The little babies who cry foul when a Duck Dyansty superstar decides for us all "what's what" regarding "the gay" would really cry like the Black Swan in Swan Lake after reading Wolin's incisive commentary of an infliction that is coming dangerously close to Fascism in America. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
Liberals like me, among the frequent scapegoats of the hard-core and full-tilt boogie of the Conservative war machine and agitprop monopoly, are often not heard. Wolin examines why this is so. In Wolin-world, after all, a democracy cannot become a revolutionary Communist state without first kicking itself free of social welfare programming and leaving it up to "two party self-regulation" rather than the more familiar three-party regulation linking business and politics through the law. The thrill-kill cultists of the Tea Party would rather not accept the almost now-ancient tradition of compromise, and are unwilling to even budge an inch in their reprisal of whatever it is the Liberals and Progressives managed to do to their green little garden world.
Wolin treats this phenomenon quite untactfully, mainly because, like many of us in the U.S., Wolin is dumbstruck by the shock-and-awe tactics the Conservative Right uses to literally attempt to drown the federal government in a bathtub, courtesies to the wishes of one Grover Norquist, the scion of the Polaroid fortune, no pun about "polarity" intended here. Apparently, Norquist, and many very rich men (and women) does not appreciate being required to do anything requiring something as "antiquated" as "nobelese oblige" an ancient parliamentary tradition in which the very rich indeed do help those with less than they. In other words, the very rich, in a sort of hidden and enshadowed class war of their own, want to liberate themselves from any and all public responsibility that might require them to actually care about others. Wolin, like Saul, describes this as a sort of Age of Antisocial Freedom: the freedom to act irresponsibly in public and to expect others to simply listen and to never speak truth to power.
Why has the necessary communication, something mutual between government and the polity, has been bashed like an aging Buick is a question we all should ask. In steps MGMT, the mediator, the living television set in the room, an entity that wants us to look-see but never consider or contemplate the inclusive and often unintended consequences of an aristocracy or oligharchy that has so separated itself from the concerns of the widening underclass as to literally begin to resemble the Court of Louis the Sixteenth, the unlucky French King beheaded in the Great French Terror as the French peasantry, inspired by the American revolution, the very first anti-imperialist revolution against a much more powerful enemy, could not find its sense of "demos", a sort of mutually shared political identity that allows all to be included regardless of ideology.
In Wolin's view, ideology is the perfect tool to smash the state. Once the battle-cry of the Weather Underground in the early 1970s, while Liberals are caught in the middle of a battle between two extremes, right and left, "fools to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you", an old Scot song from the Seventies that indeed describes what is happening: a widening gap between those with "special" interests that seemingly have been allowed to override the necessary connection between the citizenry and the government.
In other words, we are becoming a money-obsessed contemporary version of ancient Rome, not so much famous for the supposed immoral infractions of excess but mainly for its summary excess in gleaning all the gold and hauling it back to Rome to do for the Romans what the Romans wanted to do with the money: Leave the body, take the canolli. Americans do feel a distortion coming on, as our freedoms and shared values begin to vanish into the Leviathan maw of "special" interests (I almost feel like highlighting "special" in kind of bubble letters like kids in the Sixties did on their brown-paper book covers, but what is the use, it's so "special", isn't it?) and slowly replaced by more prevailing values such as "selfies" and "self", of "me, myself and I" and no one else included in the exchange called, for some odd reason, "the market".
Yeah. Piggy has been taking it to "market" for quite some time, hasn't it? And that is the point: what use is "fairness", "liberty", "justice for all" and "equality" if the true-false equation of irony is "self", "more to self" and "Rat Pack One to Rat Pack Two, CB good buddy come in...."? Oddly, the old Beat poet puts this quite succinctly: How Long? How long must we wait for fairness?
How Long is not a city in China, either. When "ambition", "power", "endless expansion" and "privatized imperialism" replace the values of a democratic republic, something is terribly wrong. Yes it is. The "economic power" has now spilled-over into the "political equation" and the "exclusivity" of mutual assured creative destruction has replaced the idea of "disinterestedness", the other now-forgotten political tradition of letting-go of one's political ideologies once the game of the campaign is over. Then what? Why not try statesmanship?
Oh, never mind. That is not the "answer" to Grover Norquist's seeming need to give the nation a bath. That is "bad" in German, and Norquist should know this. The fact he probably does does not make life any better for the poor. But who cares? If the special interests get theirs, why bother with idiotic concepts like "honesty is the best policy"? Ideology is a weapon that uses irony: What is with the theocratic wing of the Conservative movement doing obsessed with money anyway? Isn't Mammon supposed to be off-limits to Christians? Never mind. No one is going to listen to that in a world of "prosperity gospel" and creationism anyway.
The prevailing winds of the political weather report is that, with ideology, others do not matter anymore. What is more important? Helping a 92-year-old shut-in get food? Or the manufacture of golf balls? Fox decides, you agree. Wolin does take some pot-shots at the U.S. financial sector, about the only sector that seems to be successful, but he is not going to bother taking any prisoners. Why should he? This is a desperate situation involving America's poor, more and more being disenfranchised from the "money game" and the tactics of "encirclement" than ever: Put it in the middle and then get behind it. Use loud volleys of shame and guilt, outrage and hide the tomfoolery. This is an old "divide and conquer" tactic, and if "media" is MGMT, then the crucial connection between government and the people has literally been aborted. The cord? Cut. Severed.
No wonder people are angry. Wolin then criticizes the now-infamous Bush/Cheney lie machine that led many down the primrose path of what could or could not be a proxy war with our old enemies: The theocratic empires of the Old World. Are we the Antchrist now? The collection plates need to be fed. How would it feel, if the churches can handle the poor, if the good Christians, averse to taxation as theft, to be forced to pay 70 percent of their income to feed the people they want to indoctrinate in a sort of "equal opportunity enslavement"? Nothing better than to shame the enemy on public television, especially when, suddenly, out of nowhere, public responsibility to be at least a little aware of others and their shared interests is to be obliterated with an ideology of absolutism?
I highly reccommend this book. Occupy Wall Street: This book has your name written all over it. Managed democracy. Sound familiar? MGMT has entered the building like Elvis. Never shall the people meet their government without the real nanny in the room. It's called MGMT. Brought to you by whatever.
According to Wolin, due to a conjuncture of factors, the US has backed into "inverted totalitarianism". Unlike the varieties of totalitarianism in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's USSR - they were top down, centralized, and attempting to dominate all political discourse with propaganda and brute authoritarian force - inverted totalitarianism is indirect, decentralized, and not dependent on some charismatic dictator. It is a system that evolved without plan. In accordance with this logic, it enables a closed elite to control events by overwhelming citizens with what's come to be called fake news, an obsession with military security, and the increasing use of management techniques (including advertising, economic efficiency models, etc.). While it advantages republicans, the democrats are full participants as well, as the latter's connections to Wall Street attest.
In my reading, there are 3 principal elements to Wolin's conjuncture. First, there were the intentions of the founding fathers themselves: Madison and Hamilton agreed that "the mob" was dangerous, hence they wanted a "republican" form of government and not a "democratic" one, referring not to the parties that emerged later but to rule by elites of wealth, property, and power. Furthermore, they designed our constitution to inhibit change, blocking the voice of the people. Second, with the advent of the military-industrial complex, the elite gained a new kind of unquestionable legitimacy, whereby they had to "protect" citizens and hence excluded them from strategy considerations that were deemed too esoteric and sensitive for open democratic debate. W took this to a new extreme after 9/11. Third, also post-WWII, there was the rise of management science to ideological dominance, an economics logic that offered its own quasi-religious precepts that informed a total faith in the efficiency of the market and mechanisms to "manage" democracy in accordance with "social science".
In practical terms, this translates into more and more areas that escape the democratic scrutiny that were once the province of public policy and subject to regulation and political debate. The mechanisms include privatization - of prisons, military operations, and other kinds of public service - but also the appointment of military specialists. Moreover, the methodologies of management and economics limit the spectrum of political possibility, e.g. the distribution of income and even the minimum wage are deemed illegitimate by certain politicians and hence outside of legitimate discussion as the "market" must be respected. Wolin argues that these developments represent a vital threat to the integrity of our institutions and political life. This is something I fully agree with - and once you start thinking about it, the more you notice this going on in American (and western) public life. Wolin weaves it all into a seamless gestalt.
This brings us to inverted totalitarianism. I have struggled with this notion, not quite able to get my mind around it completely. I will probably have to re-read the book more carefully. Rather than a dependence on autocratic power or ideology, it is a political system attached to abstract ideals that enable an elite to exert control. Rather than dominated by a police state, the public is exhausted by life's demands, easily distracted, essentially preoccupied hence unable to mobilize itself politically; intractable pseudo-issues, such as cultural preferences or abortion, drain energy from debates, creating wedge issues to exploit and then forget once in power. The result is a return to elite oligarchic rule, similar to that envisaged by Madison but via modern means and technologies. Obviously, this is highly relevant to contemporary politics and open to interpretation, i.e. that Trump is either trying to remedy this ("drain the swamp") or he is the culmination of it in his authoritarian style that depends on traditional elites like the military and appointees from Goldman Sachs - or both. Finally, Wolin suggests some remedies in the form of grassroot initiatives at the local level, though I think they are weak.
This is one of the most profound and engaging political books I have read in years, pregnant with possibility regarding the interpretation of our current politics. As such, it is very difficult to digest, due to the non-linear nature of the presentation of its many fruitful ideas. I recommend this to everyone who is interested in improving the American political system, in understanding better what has happened to us. I think it is a masterpiece by a great political philosopher. Recommended warmly.
Top reviews from other countries
Wolin does an excellent job of dissecting the corruption found in the American political system: lobbyists are now the main political actors - not citizens, not voters. Big business and big government are entwined in an incestuous embrace while we the people are left to go through the motions of perfunctory voting once every four years.
Inverted totalitarianism is unlike classical totalitarianism (Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia). These earlier versions of totalitarianism mobilized the masses to show solidarity with one another and obedience to the Leader whereas inverted totalitarianism relies on a fragmented society of competitive individuals who are terrified of losing their jobs to cheaper foreign labour or losing their lives in a terrorist attack. A frightened, exhausted herd is much easier to manage. If people are working two jobs and just barely keeping their heads above water how are they going to have the time, energy or interest to become politically involved?
If the elites can successfully manage the herd, they can get on with the business of "democracy" without having to explain things to the people. It's politics conducted in the style of the corporate boardroom and the takeover is complete.
This review is of the paperback version which was published in 2010. The author includes a new preface in which he addresses the election of President Obama and its effect on inverted totalitarianism. His conclusions? I won't spoil it for you; it's a great read and I recommend it to everyone, American or otherwise.
The book could have used some closer editing as it states that the Berlin Wall fell in 1987 (it fell in 1989) and that the Korean War took place from 1951 to 1954 (the actual dates of that conflict were 1950-1953). Minor details perhaps, but they should be pointed out even though they in no way detract from Wolin's reasoning.









